“Reclaiming mental health as Asian Americans”

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After I got the advice from a friend to re-join a second library system, I used my Manhattan address to confirm access to the Queens Library last week, which I hadn’t accessed since 2012, when I lived in the borough. I always had Queens Library access and New York Public Library access since I first moved here, as it was one of the very first things I did once I got set up in this new city; Queens covers just the borough of Queens (since it’s so freaking huge!), while New York PL provides access for Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. As an avid reader, I figured it would be wise to continue getting access to books that my tax payer dollars were covering. Until 2018, I was borrowing hard copies and picking them up/dropping them off at the nearest library. But since then, I access the library fully electronically via the Libby app. This then allows me to either listen to audio books directly from the app, or send the electronic book from the library directly to my Kindle. It’s been amazing: I cannot even count how many books I’ve read this way, and I’m obsessed.

The first book I got off the wait list for in Queens Library that NYPL did not even have in its catalog was Permission to Come Home: Reclaiming Mental Health as Asian Americans, which is written by psychologist Jenny T. Wang (who I actually started following on Instagram during the pandemic!). I already knew by page 2 that this was going to be a good book after I read this line:

“Our suffering and well-being do not exist solely in overcoming major crises or managing diagnoses, but also within the conversations held behind closed doors, in the tears we shed alone in the shower, and in the deep emotions that we cannot ignore despite our best efforts.”

I think when the average person thinks about mental health, they do define it based on crises and diagnoses; they don’t think about the everyday interactions and how they have such an impact on us. I think that is especially lost on older Asian generations like my parents, who think of “mental health” being a concern just for people who are “psychotic,” “crazy,” or “mental.”

I’m about halfway through the book now. It’s an easy to digest read, but it’s definitely extremely triggering, especially once we got into the section called “Boundaries.” So I can’t read too much of it at once and need to give myself breaks, which is what the author actually suggests, along with questions to stop and ask yourself. Other than the sexual and physical boundaries subtitles, my parents have basically violated every other boundary of mine:

They regularly would go through my belongings, from reading letters addressed to me without my permission to my school binders and notebooks to my closet/drawers; my dad has even gone into my electronic files on the shared computer, which resulted in quite the family drama.

They eavesdrop on my conversations and then would gossip about it later/yell at me for what I discussed with others.

Whenever I come home, I’m constantly being asked to do this, do that, with zero regard for what I might be in the middle of doing. I get yelled at if I don’t come right away.

When I come home, I’m expected to drop any plans I had made with any friend/relative so that I can spend time with them… most of the time doing nothing, just being under the same roof. She used to insist that, “(Insert name) is not that important… tell them you are sick and can’t make it,” or, “You already saw (insert name) a couple days ago. Why do you need to see them again? WHAT IS SO IMPORTANT OVER YOUR FAMILY?” And, if I don’t cancel the plans, then I’m “disobedient and against my parents, which means you’re against Jehovah!”

When I was in middle and high school, my mom used to regularly call my friends and ask them to be spies, to “report back” anything “inappropriate” I might have been doing. A friend I used to go hang out with after school at her house was one of these people. She told me my mom would regularly call her to “make sure” I really did go to her house.

Once I started working, I knew something was very, very wrong with my mom’s demand that I only take time off to come home and see her. If I took time off for a trip, it had to be with them. I was not permitted to take time off for myself, to take a trip with friends, or god forbid, a trip with a boyfriend/partner. So when I did take small trips to hang out with friends or travel to new places with them, I just didn’t tell her. The first time I finally admitted to taking a week off to go to Mexico with my then-boyfriend, the fireworks went on for two days. All she did was scream and yell. She said I was betraying her; I was not to supposed to take trips with a man I wasn’t married to; I wasn’t supposed to take time off unless it was to see her. How could I be so selfish…?

My mom has “tested” me by asking to me to write her checks for thousands of dollars… for dental and health procedures that she didn’t even need or follow through with. It was all a test to see how “loyal” I was to her. After sending her one of the checks (and after she cashed it), she told me she ended up not proceeding with that dental procedure. You can imagine how annoyed I was (and how infuriated my husband was…). She just wanted the money and likely had zero intention of ever getting the procedure done from the beginning.

My mom used to say to me regularly, “I control you until you get married, and then when you get married, your husband controls you.” That was fun to hear. I guess it’s no wonder why I made a goal during my senior year of college to get a job out on the East Coast, far out of her control and constant spying. And once I moved to New York, I vowed to never live anywhere close to my parents ever again.

She also used to tell me regularly that Ed and I “have no right to get angry at your parents! You have NO right! We do everything for you, and you get angry with us?!”

It took me a while to figure out that being angry at one’s parents, or at anyone, is completely fine and healthy. All feelings – happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, whatever – they are what they are. There is no such thing as a right or wrong feeling. It’s just a matter of how you deal with them and move forward with them that matters. To tell someone they aren’t allowed to feel is pretty inhumane… and quite sad, when you think about it.

My first therapist once asked me, “Do you think you will ever move back to San Francisco?” I paused for a bit, and then responded, “I’m not sure. I don’t think so? Maybe I could. But only after they’re both dead.” It sounds like a very harsh thing to say, but I really meant it. The truth hurts. I don’t think my mental health could handle being that close to them. They have no concept of boundaries or how to treat me (or really, anyone else) respectfully and with true kindness. And like any other human being, I deserve to be treated with respect and kindness. I’m not asking for that much.

It’s hard to think about the fact that I will never have a good relationship with either of my parents. In an ideal world, we’d get along and be much closer. But it’s not meant to be. Ed was the same way. But his life has already ended. Mine hasn’t… not yet, anyway.

Cancer

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In the last several weeks, the world got the news about the British royal family that they’d all guessed, but weren’t 100 percent sure of: The Princess of Wales was diagnosed with cancer. She’s only 42 years old, so of course, this was met with much shock and sadness. Even I felt sad when I read the news. If someone who likely has access to the best food, nutrition, wellness, and healthcare, amongst other resources, can get a cancer diagnosis so young, then the rest of us are definitely screwed. My next thought was: yep, the rest of us… we’re all going to get cancer and die.

As I was checking in with a friend over text tonight about how her recent trip to Japan went with her parents and brother, I was shocked to learn of some health news about her dad: he just got diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called chordoma. Over the last several months, he’d had some lower back pain that kept getting worse. Initially, they just thought it was arthritis, so they had him see a physical therapist, but it didn’t help. He went in for a scan which showed nothing, but they failed to scan the part of the back where he felt the pain, so my friend pushed for an MRI of his lower back… which ended up revealing a malignant mass on his sacrum. Chordoma can occur anywhere along the spine and it’s extremely rare: only 1 in one million people get diagnosed with chordoma per year. He’s scheduled for an appointment later this week to determine the best course for his case, which may be surgery to remove the mass.

This made me so sad. When my friend was in high school, her mom got diagnosed with breast cancer. They all suspected that it might be related to her work, as she was a nail technician at a nail salon (we all know that nail salon workers are at a high risk of getting cancer due to all the fumes they inhale all day long). Luckily, she got chemo and the cancer disappeared. Then, at age 27 while my friend was in medical school, she got diagnosed with a rare lymphoma, and thus medical school got put on hold. Her type of lymphoma was even rarer: only 0.4 people per million per year are diagnosed with it each year. That would mean that in her family of five, 60 percent of her family had experienced cancer. There’s no way this diagnosis could have been easy to hear.

We can only hope for the best since we’re living in a toxic, chemical-laden world. I just hope her dad makes his way out alive in this for their family’s sake.

Homemade soy candle from candle-making kit is tunneling

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A couple months ago, I used the soy candle making kit I ordered for a holiday team building event. I spent an afternoon melting wax, mixing in essential oils, and hand pouring into my candle jars with a glued-on wick in each jar. I made four candles and gave three of them away, keeping a lavender-sage scented one for myself. I was especially excited about mine because I added some extra pure lavender oil that I’d gotten during a New Zealand trip back in 2013, when we visited a vibrant lavender farm and I purchased a tiny vial.

Unfortunately, as I burned the candle the last couple of nights, I quickly realized that the candle was not of the highest quality: the wick is not big enough for the diameter of the jar (which really isn’t that big!), and so even when you burn it as long as you should, so 3-4 hours, it’s impossible for the wick to burn the wax fully and evenly to the ends of the jar. I went back to the Amazon listing and saw that only one reviewer noted this and posted a photo for proof. It looked exactly like my candle tunnel! The only plus side is that the scent definitely does carry well.

I spent last night using the foil method to try to reduce the tunneling; it helped a little, but not much. And today, I finally took out my heat gun that I use for heat embossing to lightly blow heat on the candle to even out the wax buildup on the sides of the candle jar. While the heat gun was far more effective than the foil method, now, my issue is that my wick is fully covered. So my next step, once this wax fully hardens, is to carve out some of the wax (that will unfortunately mean wax and essential oil waste!!) and burn the candle as evenly as I possibly can. These are definitely first-world problems.

Lasagne bolognese – first time in years!

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I was rummaging through my cupboards to see what random things I’d purchased that I’ve forgotten about over the years, and I found some no-boil lasagne noodles I’d purchased at Trader Joe’s. I still remember when I bought this item, too: it was in autumn 2021 when I was very pregnant, and I thought then that a good dish to make while on maternity leave would be lasagne. Well, little did I know that layering pasta noodles with a long-simmered meat or vegetable sauce and different cheeses would be little priority with a tiny human to constantly care and pump milk for.

So I took out the package and decided that lasagne for our home was long, long overdue. I used my latest Butcherbox ground beef to make a four-hour simmered bolognese sauce on Friday. It even injured me with all the bubbling, as the sauce popped everywhere, including the inside of my right wrist, which still has purple-red bruise marks from the burn marks. Lucky me with my food prep, I already had my parmesan finely grated and stored in the freezer for future use. And today, I spent the late morning layering my lasagne in my much-neglected 13×9 casserole pan. And it felt really fun and satisfying. Lasagne making is almost like therapy. It’s very methodical but doesn’t take too much thinking. Once you know the method: one layer of noodles, one 1-cup layer of bolognese, one 1/2-cup layer of bechamel, and one 1/3-cup layer of grated parmesan — you just keep following it until you run out of noodles. Unfortunately for Trader Joe’s, I only had 3.5 out of five needed layers of pasta, so my pasta layering process got abruptly cut short, so I had to improvise my top layer.

But when it came out of the oven, I was pretty satisfied: forty-five minutes in the oven yielded an evenly browned and bubbly top, with a lid that was very crunchy and satisfying. A small piece really left me feeling satisfied with my efforts from Friday as well as today. It also confirmed something else I’ve always thought: every time I’ve had lasagne that was not homemade, I’ve just never been as happy with it. The meat sauce is rarely as nuanced and flavorful as the one I’ve made, and likely the quality of the meat to the cheese is never as high. Most of them rely too heavily on too much shredded mozzarella to mask anything that the sauce is lacking. So it always feels like a deflating experience ordering it out. Lasagne is really one of those things that I think needs to be homemade, loved, and eaten at home. My next idea is to make spinach lasagne with four cheeses, which I just got an email about from Food & Wine. It’s a doozy in other ways in that it uses four different cheeses and certainly is not for anyone who is watching their waistline, but I still think it’s worth an occasional indulgence… especially since before this, the last time I made a lasagne was when we still lived on the east side — that was over 7 years ago!!

Another bonus: I doubled the bolognese recipe, so I have a full recipe of bolognese meat sauce in my freezer, frozen in large 1/2-C cubes! So less work and more enjoyment in the future await. In that sense, the inner wrist bruising from the sauce burn is more worth it given it was an investment also in future meals and not just this week’s.

Diner food, with a Thai spin

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Growing up, I never really understood the obsession with American diners. I hated that Mel’s Drive-in was always so popular for meals. I disliked that I would even go there with friends as the “no-brainer” place to hang out and eat a relatively affordable meal (while in middle and high school). I was never excited by the generic food with the generic decor and okay-to-subpar service. I had no idea why anyone would *love* a diner.

Then, Chris found this place called Little Grenjai in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, which we visited today. It’s a Thai-style diner that recently opened in Bedford Stuyvesant. It’s kind of all the fun, quirky parts of an American diner, from the booth seating to the bright lights, with delicious Thai-inspired food. The kaprow burger is the go-to for lunch, which we got with a Thai-style fried duck egg. And it was kind of the perfect burger: a thin, pork-based meat patty, spiced exactly as pad kaprow is, with a lingering heat at the end and slightly crisp edges; fresh Thai basil inside in lieu of boring, flavorless lettuce, two fluffy sesame buns, and a perfectly deep-fried Thai-style duck egg with super crisp brown edges and a yolk that literally exploded all over my hands after I took a single bite. Pookster was even amused, as we ordered a side of fries, which to our surprise, came out in a pouch of large coin-shaped potato disks. Pookster happily ate almost the whole bag while people watching in the diner.

If diner food were this good at Mel’s Drive-in, maybe I wouldn’t have disliked it so much growing up in San Francisco.

4.8 earthquake in New York today

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Earthquakes are something I grew up with. Given that I was born and raised in San Francisco, while we were in school, we had earthquake drills as often as we had fire drills, so anyone growing up in San Francisco, or California for that matter, was well versed on what to do in the event of an earthquake. We always knew to get under heavy tables/desks or stand under load-bearing door frames. We also knew that if we had to evacuate a building, to never, ever use the elevator during an earthquake, but instead to take the stairs. I suppose that’s the same advice to heed during a fire, as well.

In 2011, New York City experienced an earthquake. I still remember I was at a work lunch when all the tables and chandeliers above us started shaking. Everyone was freaking out. My colleagues complained about it for days and talked about how scared they were. I was a bit nonchalant about it and barely said anything; that shake was nothing to me.

Well, we had an earthquake that lasted a couple seconds this morning. It was just past 10:30am when I was at my desk working. Suddenly, I noticed my entire desk shaking, plus the mug of hot, steaming chai I just made about to spill. It ended pretty quickly, though. But within ten minutes as I checked my Instagram, almost every other post was about the earthquake that hit us. The New York Times and BBC reported it was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake that originated about 50 miles outside of New York City, in New Jersey. Everyone in my Facebook groups were wishing each other safety or sharing how scared they were .

My reaction is still, “meh.” I had a meeting today where I had to present, and a few of my colleagues asked if I was okay and how things were in New York. I just smiled and told them it was a little shake, no biggie.

“Okay, I think Yvonne is the only calm person in all of New York City right now!” my colleague declared, laughing.

Honestly, when you’ve dealt with far more frightening or traumatizing things in life, you cannot sweat the small stuff. And the small stuff, for me. is a 4.7 earthquake. I raised my eyebrow for a second, then I let it go after the shake stopped.

“Mummy not here!”

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People always say with children that the days are long, but the weeks / years are short. All the cute, sweet moments are often forgotten and lost in the depths of your mind. That’s partly why I write about them — so that if/when I do forget, I will always have a log to go back to and remember what cute, sweet things Kaia did that gave me warm and fuzzy feelings.

The last few weeks, I’ve been trying my best to get to the gym by 6:30am for an hour-long workout. It always makes me feel much more productive to start the day earlier, and it also means I don’t feel like I’m in a rush every morning to get my workout, shower, dressing done before turning on my computer, after Kaia leaves for school. This also means that sometimes, I can walk Kaia to school. It also means I can have a more leisurely morning preparing my tea and reading the news.

Kaia tends to wake up sometime between 6:50-7:15, and when she does, she will usually go to her book shelf, grab a book, then mozy her way over (still in her sleep sack!) to our bedroom. Sometimes, she goes to Chris’s side of the bed first, and other times, she goes to my side. As of late, she’s been going to my side, but alas, I haven’t been there since I’ve been at the gym. So she thinks I’m “hiding” underneath the covers, which I find absolutely hilarious, and she’ll pull the covers down to “find” me. When she realizes I’m actually not there after pulling the covers down to see no one, she will say “YThi not here,” or “mummy not here.” And then Chris will respond, “YThi at the gym.” Then, Kaia will repeat, “YThi at the gym.”

And when I return from the gym about half an hour after she wakes up, as soon as I open the door and put my keys in the basket, she will happily yell out, “Hi, mummy-dear!” before she even sees me. Then, I go up to her to kiss her and give her exaggerated “sniffs” on her hair, which makes her giggle. And I ask her if she slept well.

Witnessing these moments of innocence of young childhood never ceases to warm my heart and makes me think that becoming a parent is more than worth all the effort and exhaustion.

When your toddler comes home with a bite mark on her back

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Yesterday when reviewing the daily report from school, Chris noticed that there was an “incident” report recorded with a photo of Kaia’s back, noting that Kaia had been injured by a classmate. There was a typo in the report, so I wasn’t sure exactly what happened until I spoke with the teacher at drop off this morning. The teacher let me know that Kaia and a classmate were fighting over the same toy, and Kaia had an iron grip on it. The other child retaliated by biting her in the middle of her back, which resulted in Kaia crying and having a lingering red mark on her back.

“Kaia cried, and I felt so terrible because she never cries!” the teacher said to me, with a frown on her face.

I didn’t realize it was a bite from the original report because of the typo. But I did notice the mark when I gave her a bath. The bite was the size of a large strawberry, and it seemed weird that it would have been so dark and red. At first, I wondered what toy would have left such a mark. Now that I found out it was a bite from another child, the mark made much more sense.

At this age, kids don’t always understand what you are trying to say to them, and you definitely do not always understand them. They’re still learning what is considered “appropriate” vs “inappropriate” behavior with family, friends, and classmates, and so it’s hard to fault them when things like this happen. I shrugged it off and told the teacher I wasn’t that concerned. Toddlers will be toddlers. She said she felt relieved after I said this.

“Not all parents let these things go,” she said with a sigh. “They ask us how we couldn’t have prevented it from happening!”

With babies and toddlers, things like this happen in just seconds, and you can’t be everywhere all at once. Taking care of littles can be very all-encompassing and exhausting. We just have to let these things go and move on.

Sweet Malaysian freebies at closing time

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Once upon a time, there were a number of bakeries across New York City that would offer deeply discounted baked goods within 30 minutes to an hour of closing. Manna House Bakery on Mott Street in Chinatown used to offer all pastries and bao at 50% off if you arrived about 30 minutes before their closing time; I only found this out by chance when I popped in one evening many years ago, and the lady behind the counter quoted me half of the amount that I was expecting to owe. The much loved and venerated Balthazar Bakery would offer their elaborate pastries for a discounted amount, and sometimes they even had random grab bags that would have a set (low) price. Eventually, though, all good (and cheap) things come to an end, and both bakeries put a halt to their slashed pre-closing prices.

I was reminded of this last night when I was in the East Village for dinner with a friend. On our way to the subway station, we passed by Lady Wong, one of the best (and rare) fancy bakeries in the city for Malaysian-inspired desserts, including the famous kuih. As we stepped in, we weren’t sure if they were still open, so we asked. The man behind the counter looked up, greeted us and said he would still be open for five more minutes. Then, he smiled and said, “Take it all!” We thought he was just joking given the closing time. So we each chose two items each and paid. As we were about to leave, he looked at us quizzically.

“You don’t want any kuih? I’m serious: if you don’t want it, I will throw it all out! You can take whatever you want, just tell me which ones…. just not the serimukkah because those are my favorite.” He smiled as he said this. He explained that it was highly unusual to have this much leftover at the end of the day; usually, they are almost sold out. But today was a weird day with the grey, cool weather, and they didn’t get as much foot traffic as they normally do. He couldn’t eat all of the remaining kuih, nor would he be selling them the next day. So my friend and I got really excited and told him which ones we’d like. He got them all ready in two separate boxes for each of us.

We thanked him profusely, and being very Asian, he brushed us off. “It’s okay… if you didn’t take them, they’d just be going into the trash bin!” he insisted. As he was boxing these up for us, a group of friends walked in, obviously having read about the place since two of them were explaining to their friends that this spot was “known for Malaysian dessert.” The guy behind the counter, who I *think* is one of the co-owners, told us in a near-whisper, “Don’t say anything, okay?” So in other words, he was going to give us all these freebies, but he definitely had plans to charge these folks!

We walked out with our paid and free sweets. I wasn’t sure what cracked me up more, the fact that he said we could take any of the kuih, *except* the serimukkah since they were his favorites, or that he was happy to give us these freebies, but was planning to charge the other group of people who came in after us!

“Don’t get lost, Mummy dear”

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Babies and toddlers are true human sponges. They are always soaking up and in every single thing around them all the time, whether we are cognizant of it or not. Because I have a very loving (facetious) husband, most of the time when we part and I am leaving the apartment, he will hug or kiss me and say, “don’t get lost!” Kaia has clearly noticed this. So this morning, when I was getting ready to go to the gym as Chris was getting her out the door to go to school, she ran to me to give me a goodbye hug and kiss, and after she looked at me square in the eyes, smiled, and said, “don’t get lost, mummy dear!”

While getting her ready, she will notice that one of us is not wearing a coat or shoes, so she will remind us: “Shoes on, Daddy-ma!” or “Put your jacket on, Mummy dear!” Sometimes, she will even giggle and say, “Mommy dear, guai guai ah!” (in other words, loosely translated as “you be good/you be well-behaved!”

For better or for worse, she is learning most of these things from her own parents. Every time something new like this happens, I can’t help but crack up and just want to squeeze her close. It’s too adorable and sweet, even if it can be a little annoying at times.